Tuesday, February 16, 2010

U.S. Search Statistics ... Local Search is Gaining!

The U.S. search marketplace appears to have solidified in recent months with Google garnering almost two-thirds market share. Yahoo and Microsoft trailed behind, according to results released by comScore.

Google captured 65.4% of the search market in January -- a miniscule drop from its 65.7% share in the previous month.

Yahoo recorded 17%, down from 17.3% in December. Microsoft managed a gain, recording 11.3% for its Bing search engine. In December, Microsoft's search share totaled 10.7% of the search market. Rounding out the results were Ask Network, which recorded 3.8% and AOL LLC Network's 2.5%. Ask and AOL's results were virtually unchanged from December.

A year ago, prior to Bing's launch, ComScore put Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market at 8.5%.

"Americans conducted 15.2 billion searches in January, up 3% from December," comScore said in a release Thursday. "Google sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375)."

Craigslist and Facebook also made appearances in the comScore search results with the former recording 636 million searches and the latter logging 395 million searchers. comScore noted that Facebook's searches represented a 13% gain. Other notable percentage changes were recorded by Fox Interactive Media, which dropped 5% from 424 million searches to 403 million searches from the December to January months.

According to comScore, another big loser was the Amazon sites category, which fell 21% to 238 million searchers in January from 302 million searches in the earlier month.

Source: Information Week